WHY DO WE OFFER THIS PROGRAM

The Performance SEO program was designed because of the rampant deception found in the SEO industry. Companies don’t trust SEO firms and in large part most SEO companies should not be trusted. SEO is a profession that takes a great deal of training and an immense amount of time. This skill was reduced to a formulaic process a decade ago which lead to rampant expansion of sales forces selling regimented programs executed out of India. Google systematically decimated these formulaic programs over the past 10 years leaving hundreds of hollow sales agencies peddling processes that simply don’t work anymore. To gain your trust, we need to prove that we know search engine optimization.

WHAT MAKES OUR SEO PROGRAM UNIQUE

This program is not a flat cost per month like other programs. Cost is split into two pricing tiers. The price before we meet our goal, and the price after. The goal is a number of visitors to your site. Performance-based SEO has fallen out of favor in the industry primarily because scale-able techniques (white hat and black hat alike) that worked in the past simply don’t work anymore. Because costs are so much higher now, performance based SEO is much riskier now. We can make it work because we do charge a monthly fee which helps to cover about half of the monthly expenses associated with doing the work. We invest the rest and we treat the program like a partnership with everyone doing their part to grow the business.

WHAT ARE PAY-FOR-PERFORMANCE COMPETITORS DOING

We looked at the competitors doing ads offering pay for performance programs before building the Think BIG program first to understand how they made money and managed risk and to understand how we can add value that is not already being provided in the industry. There were 2 main competitors offering pay for performance SEO programs.

The first competitor we looked at was resultfirst.com (https://www.resultfirst.com/services/pay-for-performance-seo/). The program is advertised as pay only if you get on the first page for the target keywords. This program is run out of India where payment is tiered based on the search position achieved. Position 1-3, Position 4-6, and Position 7-10. We don’t personally like this type of pay because it is nearly impossible to account for rank with google offering different search results to different individuals based on geography and other patterns and search position does not always directly translate to traffic. However, The big caveat of their program is the following quote from the bottom of their page: “You don’t spend a penny if we don’t improve your ranks. All that you have to pay is the initial set up fee to cover the cost that we incur which is determined based on the industry, man hours, keyword difficulty, current SEO score, and several others.” The fact is that their free program is not free.

The second competitor we looked at was rankpay.com (https://www.rankpay.com/pay-for-performance-seo/). This program is free to start and bases their pay on a tier like resultfirst but have more tiers (1-3, 4-6, 7-10, 11-20, 21-30). The issues we see with this program are that positions 11-30 do not really provide much value and are exponentially easier to achieve. In addition, they charge for improved rankings on yahoo and bing which do not provide much value but will still trigger payments. Our concern in addition to the general concerns about paying for position is that looking at pricing of test keyword relative to projected real value makes the service very expensive. An easy to achieve long tail keyword with low traffic will still trigger fees. If a search gets 300 searches a month, 5% will click somewhere on page 2. If equally weighted, that means that 6 will visit your site. A search in that traffic range will cost between $66 and $123 if you are found on page 2. That is a cost of between $10 and $20/click. ROI would get better if you get into the top 3 (same search volume would mean 100 clicks for a cost of 2.37 per click), but liklihood of achieving a 1-3 position far less likely without significant investment of time and money. We cannot speak to the success of their program, but would predict most clients are paying on keywords ranking on the second and third page.

FUNDAMENTALS OF SEO

The fundamentals of SEO are links in to your site and content. Despite evolution over the years, links and content remain the foundation of the google alogrithm. Every search engine optimization program should have link building and content at its heart. However, both content and link building can have very wide costs depending on quality. A link from harvard.edu will carry much more weight than a link from your personal blog. It will also be exponentially harder to get a link from harvard.edu than linking from your personal blog. Content also varies considerably with the most common form of content being written by robots, low cost foreigners, or outsourced content writers. Think BIG writes content in house by our dedicated content writers or written by the marketing directors; However, in the industry, rarely is content written in house these days because you can’t get a client to pay what a quality piece of content is worth.

WHY IS THE PROGRAM NOT FREE TO START

Performance based implies that payment is only made when a goal is met, however, this changes the economics of the business which we believe does a disservice to you the client. If compensation is only made after goals have been met, then the business is forced to rely on low to no cost tools and rely more heavily on larger quantities of clients, a smaller percentage achieving success, and longer contracts when success is achieved. In addition, it is common to setup easy to achieve goals that don’t necessarily provide noticeable benefit to the client. More importantly, I personally think that the relationship between actions and results is more ambiguous if you don’t use some of the more costly tools. Consequently, we chose to share in the real cost of doing search engine optimization (SEO) with you allowing us to provide meaningful benefit to every client at a very low cost to start and shorter contract periods.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH SEO

The problem with the SEO industry is that most of the inexpensive and scalable ways to produce links and content have been largely invalidated by google. 10 years ago, SEO was really quite simple and straightforward. Have someone write a bunch of articles and syndicate the articles to directories across the web. Your site gets a link back from every article directory. Then use a bot to post random comments on wordpress blog sites automatically across the web. Then fill the pages you are trying to rank with the target keywords over and over and over and over. Because it worked so well and was so straightforward, it could be packaged into a defined program and outsourced to another country. Soon enough, nearly all SEO agencies were really just salesforces selling defined packaged run out of India. However, starting in 2012, google began systematically penalizing any company using these techniques. Article directories and article syndication was one of the first to go. Then duplicate content in any fashion was invalidated. Blog sites started blocking auto posting, etc. Google turned SEO from being a program back into a profession, but people were addicted to the low costs borne out of SEO as a program forcing the industry into a tailspin where margin is driven by maintaining very low overhead rather than delivering true growth.

WHY IS THIS PROGRAM NOT RIGHT FOR EVERY CLIENT

The performance based SEO program is a costly program for us to run and requires a significant commitment by the client to ensure that the marketing message on the site is going to convert visitors to clients. This program is not right for sites that need significant improvements to their marketing message, design, etc. The program is also not right for companies that need too much traffic to profit $600/mo than can be reasonably accomplished in 6 months. We also find that this program is not right for companies that don’t have a good idea of what their current conversion is and how much traffic it will take to generate $600 in revenue. The POD marketing program was built for companies that need full service help with their site, message, and strategy. Ideally every client that starts with the performance SEO program will eventually transition to the POD marketing program or the remote marketing program

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PERFORMANCE-BASED SEO

Performance-based SEO is an attractive concept because it addresses one of the fundamental concenrs with modern SEO. Namely, will it work? The inherent assumption is that if someone is willing to only get paid after showing results, then it must really work or it is no loss to me. However, with a carefully crafted program, one can still make money in performance based SEO even if you fail to provide real benefit. It all comes down to how you structure the deal and managing costs. The easiest way to make money with performance based SEO is to charge for rank growth regardless of whether it leads to site traffic. It is exponentially harder to show up on the first page of google than it is to show up on the second, third, or later pages. So if you make pay based on rank growth or tier the payments based on the results page, then you can still get paid by reaching the second or third page even if a ranking on the second or third page brings virtually no traffic to the site. The other thing that happens is that for so many keywords these days, geographic locale is used as a ranking factor. This means that you can rank on the first page for a keyword in one region of the country but not in the rest. This is good for local businesses but bad for anyone targeting a national reach it also means that rankings vary based on the IP address used for the search and that if you don’t see the same ranking that your SEO company sees, it is likely because they are using a different IP address and that keyword that was supposed to provide 10000 visitors if you are on page one may really only be bringing 1 visitor but you are paying like it is 10000. The alternative to paying for rank is to pay for traffic, which is the method Think BIG uses in its performance-based SEO. There is a better correlation between pay and performance, but the system still has its challenges. Namely, the goal of SEO is to increase traffic to your site, but not all traffic is created equal. Someone searching for “Buy piano near me” is probably a better qualified lead than someone searching “buying a piano”. However, it is still traffic and that article added value to the keyword density of your site and will likely improve rankings of other better keywords long term but if you pay for traffic, you may end up not getting the ROI you had hoped for. At Think BIG, we believe that SEO is about building a robust and diverse source of traffic along with refining your marketing message. The goal of our performance based SEO program is to demonstrate that our efforts can have a positive effect on your business before asking you to pay the real cost of doing the work long term.

ABOUT US

Think BIG started in 2008 as a traditional SEO company. In 2018, Think BIG launched their new platform for pod marketing where even more services could be offered to clients and we apply the fundamentals of the sharing economy to make full service marking attainable for every business, whether marketing a small business or bigger. SEO remains a core service offered to every member of a pod but in 2019, Think BIG re-introduced a stand along SEO program (performance-based SEO) for clients that already have established marketing strategies and primarily need help getting traffic to their sites. Our team is lead by, Justin Hoopes; a veteran of e-commerce who has personally run several successful online businesses and has added his wealth of knowledge to the unique experiences of everyone on the team. The philosophy of Think BIG is to be a hive of industry. Busy bees always looking for the best way to help businesses get the maximum return on their investment whether that is through search engine optimization or something else.